The Great Dismal Swamp

The Great Dismal Swamp, known by that name since the early eighteenth century, is a forested marshland in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Although it has been shrinking over the centuries, it still covers about 175 square miles. Gazetteers and travel writers often note that it was surveyed in 1763 by George Washington. A vast wilderness, the area once served as a haven for Native Americans avoiding colonists, and as a hiding place for runaway slaves, the theme of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1842 poem "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp."[1] At its center is Lake Drummond, sometimes called the Lake of the Dismal Swamp. Writer John Tidwell has described the lake as a place that "feels ancient and dreamlike," where "huge cypresses form prehistoric-looking islands in the black, shallow water."[2] It must have made a similar impression on the Irish poet Thomas Moore. In late 1803, Moore was taken to see the Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond by John Hamilton, the British consul at Norfolk, Virginia, and Moore's host in America. Hamilton told Moore the story he used as the inspiration for a ballad he titled "The Lake of the Dismal Swamp," first published in 1806. Moore's introduction to the ballad reads as follows:

They tell of a young man, who lost his mind upon the death of a girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of. As he had frequently said, in his ravings, that the girl was not dead, but gone to the Dismal Swamp; it is supposed he had wandered into that dreary wilderness, and had died of hunger, or been lost in some of its dreadful morasses.[3]

According to Howard Mumford Jones, Moore's biographer, the ballad was "greatly admired" by "that sentimental epoch."[4] The poem's popularity in the nineteenth century and the close proximity of the Dismal Swamp to Meta Chestnutt's home in Lenoir County, North Carolina, helps to explain why she would have memorized the poem in her youth.

Notes

[1] William S. Powell, North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Places (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 145;  Archie Hobson, ed., Cambridge Gazetteer of the United States and Canada (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 176; Saul B. Cohen, ed., Columbia Gazetteer of the World, ed. Saul B. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1:839. Ridwaana Allen, "Wild Paradise: Hope in the Great Dismal Swamp." Southeastern Geographer 61, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 1-4, reports that in 2021 the swamp covers 112,000 acres, which comes out to approximately 175 square miles. For Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp," see Poems on Slavery, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: John Owen, 1842), 18-20.

[2] John Tidwell, "The Great Dismal Swamp," American Heritage 53, no. 2 (April-May 2002), 68.

[3] Thomas Moore, Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia: Hugh Maxwell, 1806), 28. For Moore's trip with John Hamilton to the Dismal Swamp and its lake, see Howard Mumford Jones, The Harp That Once--A Chronicle of the Life of Thomas Moore (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), 69-70; B. J. Lossing, "Tom Moore in America," Harper's New Monthly Magazine 55 (September 1877), 537-41.

[4] Jones, The Harp That Once, 70.